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Welcome to our online companion for careful readers and teachers of Brenda Coultas’s work. You will find reviews and analysis of her work, interviews with Coultas, as well as other writings that clarify her poetics.

“Unlike most writers who are working in hybrid forms, Coultas creates a seamless enmeshment between poetry and prose, and this consistency of voice and tone is one of her great strengths. It’s her signature, really, a kind of magical occurrence where two things merge to become a third thing—something completely different.”
—Lewis Warsh, author of A Place in the Sun and Inseparable

The Tatters is a nuanced and moving new collection of poems by Brenda Coultas. She deftly weaves a meditation on contemporary life and our place in it. Known for her investigative documentary approach, Coultas turns her attention to landfills and waste, and the odd histories embedded in the materials found there. The poems make their home among urban and rural detritus, waste, trinkets, and found objects. The title poem, for example, takes its cue from the random, yet symmetrical, pigeon feathers that city dwellers overlook as they go about their daily business. The feathers are signifiers of the wildlife of the urban landscape and serve as totems, pointing the way forward.